Heh, mylemonblue, I'm at least a newbie with Blender and I do appreciate all the tutorials and other documentation. My first opinion about Blender was quite negative, but now I'm beginning to appreciate it more and more. There are problems, but also a lot of neat hidden functionality. 

Blender is very fast to use at least when poly counts are under million. Over that, I have problems, but it may be that a quad-core system might help. :) Too bad I need all my money to other things now...